32.5
Eh, it seems to work pretty well for the NFL. Except for the amounts of guaranteed money going through the roof to players that haven’t played a snap yet (which is what I like about the NHL’s cap…earn it first).
Anyhoo, the Reds are 71-51, 20 games over .500 for the first time I can remember in recent history. Woot! And the Cardinals, after sweeping the Reds in what you would think was a momentum springboard for them going forward, have lost 5 in a row. Reds have won every game (7) since then. Interesting.
Both leagues have had these troubles because their rules differ to a certain extent from a true cap on salaries. The NBA is hampered by its soft cap and millions of exceptions and exemptions. The NHL counts the average salary of the contract against the cap instead of the actual salary earned in that season.
How many holdouts do you see in baseball? Really it seems to work pretty well in baseball too. By the way your current playoff teams in baseball are the Padres, Reds, Braves, Phillies, Twins, Rangers, Yankees, and Rays. Not exactly a list dominated by large markets.
Oh and you pay players for future performance and not past results, so the fact they haven’t done it before is pretty meaningless. Unless you think LDT should be making 20 million this year.
Only the Reds, Padres, Rangers and Rays would be considered “small market” teams on that list…if you’re going by payroll. Yanks are first, Phils are 4th and the Twins are 11th at almost $100,000,000 in payroll.
Still I see what you’re saying. I believe perhaps rookie maximum contracts are the way to go, if they are reasonably short enough to allow emerging star players to cash in big on their followup contract. Of course I don’t think LT should be making $20mil…
Market doesn’t equal payroll. The Twins, Phillies, and Rays have been able to increase their payrolls because they have put good products on the field and have had success, not because their cities suddenly grew. If the Pirates spent 200 million next year it wouldn’t make them a big market team. Even with your way of counting 4/8 seems like a pretty good ratio to me.
I think it would be hard in the nfl, because players burn out so fast. A guy who has a couple tremendous seasons and gets hurt gives tremendous value to a team, but won’t get much reward for it beyond his initial deal. Then again I think drafts are organized collusion and rookies should get whatever someone is willing to pay them, but that is a whole nother discussion.
Sure, it can.
But it is possible to predict many of the most obvious consequences of market interference. For example an Econ 101 student should have been able to foresee the consequences of the NFL’s salary floor for the distribution of young talent.
And it’s not like baseball doesn’t already fuck around with the market. It does so to an incredible degree. The luxury (aka Screw the Yankees) tax, revenue distribution, the arbitration/pre-free agent system, and especially, as Hawkeyeop points out, the draft, are all policies that interfere in the free market for baseball players.
I’m not arguing that a salary cap would be the best way to improve competitive balance (or whatever else might or might not need fixing) in baseball. I also don’t like the fact that a salary cap has the potential to take money out of the players’ pockets and return it to the owners, with little concomitant gain for the fans of the game.
The problem is that, while sports is big business and each professional sports team is also a business, sports teams are evaluated by the people who support them based on different criteria from a regular business. In some industries, the total market for a product might be best satisfied by three or four companies outstripping all the competition and providing a better product at a lower price. And if some companies are really awful, and drop out of the picture altogether, it’s not a big deal, because people don’t, for the most part, have any real long-term attachment to whether their television is a Sony or a Panasonic or a Samsung.
But people feel differently about sports, and the criteria for success are different for a sports team than for a regular company. The league itself, and even, one might argue, the teams within it, have a vested interest in maintaining a certain level of parity, otherwise they risk alienating their customers. It’s not like fans of the dismal Orioles are going to start rooting for the Yankees; they’re more likely to just stop going to games and to stop watching the team on television.
I’m not arguing that we’ve reached this situation; there are a few teams without large payrolls doing pretty well this year, and this has been the case in previous years as well. But when the Yankees, for example, can just pick up a guy like Lance Berkman, who they don’t really need, for virtually no purpose except to keep him away from other teams, i think it’s a problem. It was New York’s acquisition of Swisher, Sabbathia, Burnett, and Teixeira, all in the space of weeks, after the 2008 season, that really made clear to me how big the gap is in spending ability.
I’m not sure how to fix this, though, or if the fix mightn’t be worse than the current situation. After all, the 10 World Series i’ve seen since i moved to the US have been won by 8 different teams. That’s better, in terms of variety, than the NFL (7) and the NBA (5), and the same as the NHL (8).
Of course, this only tells part of the story. The real measure of team-building success, in terms of spending and strategy and foreseeable outcomes, is how often you make the playoffs. Sure, it’s disappointing to be bundled out in the LDS or the LCS, or even in the WS, but luck plays a big role in any 5- or 7-game series. Winning consistently over the course of a long season is the real measure of a good team, and there’s a pretty decent correlation between making the playoffs and spending money. Look at the Yankees, who have missed the playoffs exactly once in the last decade. Of course, the hapless Mets prove that it is possible to spend a bundle and still be hopeless.
Some of the small-market teams suffer from the different expectations of fans and owners. The fans would like winning teams; the owners, in some cases, seem more interested in profitable business enterprises. Revenue sharing brings in money for these teams, and some of them don’t use it in any meaningful way to improve performance. As John Henry of the Red Sox said last year:
Now, of course it’s probably not feasible for teams like Pittsburgh or Kansas City to go out chasing the $20-million-a-year free agents, especially given the way that these players also generally want long-term contract. Those teams simply can’t afford to get themselves on the hook for $120 million for one player over five or six seasons. But there’s something wrong when some perennial losers continue to make some of the largest profits in baseball while constantly playing to half-empty stadiums.
As i said, i’m not sure what the solution is, or even if there is any solution that wouldn’t be worse than the problem. One possibility would be, as FoieGrasIsEvil suggested, to put a cap on rookie contracts, which would effectively be a cap on draft signings. This would, at least, mean that a team like the Nationals doesn’t have to fork over $50 million just to sign their first draft pick, and might make it easier to build teams from the ground up. I’m sure there would be unintended consequences there too, though, and there’s also some merit to Hawkeyeop’s argument that the draft itself is simply collusion and that all players should simply be paid what the market will bear. Who knows? Maybe if they’re not protected by a draft system that guarantees them first pick of the best young talent, some crappy teams might start spending more money on players.
I was shocked to see how low the payroll of the Padres is relative to their success. And well put, mhendo.
Possible solutions:
- Nuke the Yankees. I’m not saying it would change anything. I just like the idea.
- Cap rookie contracts.
- Nuke the Yankees.
4)Do it from space!
The **Reds **are kickass. You aren’t any fun if you don’t think so!
Capping rookie contracts would cause all sorts of unintended effects, such as pushing multisport stars to other sports, preventing rebuilding teams, like the pirates this year, from focusing their assets on the draft, and transfering wealth from the draftees to the owners (I suppose that isn’t unintended).
Nuking the Yankees I can’t forsee any issues with.
There’s no need for caps. Just redefine ownership of broadcast rights–the rights to a game depiction, wherever broadcast, belong to both teams participating and the league, rather than to whichever team happens to reside in the media market where the broadcast is made.
Mandatory slot contracts for draftees would help a little too, so that “signability” doesn’t discourage some teams from using their draft picks on the (perceived) best available players.
Johnny Damon claimed on waivers.
USA Today says by unidentified team. I got a text from the YES Network saying it was the Red Sox but I don’t see any confirmation of that yet.
SI confirms what you found but is reporting Johnny may not wish to return to Red Sox. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/baseball/mlb/08/23/damon.tigers/index.html?xid=cbssports
Disappointing road trip for the Rangers, who only won 2 out of 5. However, both other contenders are also playing like crap and we continue to be 8 games up.
Hell, if the Red Sox are that stupid, maybe we can unload Manny on them, too!
Oh, Ned…
Yet another crazy pitching night. Rich Harden had a no hitter into the 6th inning and was pulled from the game at around 110 pitches. The Rangers bullpen has continued the no hitter through 8 innings.
Jose Bautista.
Yeah, hat’s odd. Damon seems to really like being in Detroit and has been agonizing about possibly going to Boston.
Dude.
Go.
Go and get us a prospect. Come back, but at a cheaper cost.
Also, nuke the Yankees. Thrice.